“The Other Woman” A Strong Contender for Worst Movie of the Year

It’s only the middle of May, but “The Other Woman” is poised to be a strong contender for Worst Movie of the Year come December 31st when I post my rankings of all the year’s movies. Sure, there will probably be worse stuff between now and then, but it’s a bottom five-r for sure. If Nancy Meyers ever made a torture porn movie, you can bet it would look a lot like this thing: all gleaming surfaces and fun beach locations with a very cynical soul-rot underneath it all.

What Works: [Crickets] Okay, so I know people will look at this movie and say “Of course, you don’t like it. You’re a young guy and it’s a movie whose audience is staggeringly female.” [I was literally the only man in the theater I saw it in despite a decent sized crowd, and the first weekend’s audience was a ridiculously uneven 76 percent female.] “It’s a movie where three woman team up to get revenge on a man, so of course you don’t like it.” People will say that, but that really, really, really misses the point of how pandering and toxic this movie is. Plus, I’m not a caveman who’ll reflexively hate every movie with female leads or a feminist sensibility. The larger point may be that The Other Woman isn’t feminist or pro-women at all. More below…

What Doesn’t Work: Other critics have pointed out how the movie would fail the Bechdel Test. [The Bechdel test is whether a movie features at least two women in a scene who are talking to each other about something other than a man.] The entire film is filled with faux-feminist “uplifting” messages about “sisters coming together” and chicks before dicks, but the only thing these women are teaming up on is how much they hate a guy who’s dating or married to all of them. They’re driven by their hatred of him more than anything else (like moving on and building their lives into something meaningful that’s independent of a love or hatred for a man), and it’s inarguable that they don’t have anything in common besides that. Cameron Diaz’s girlfriend is a corporate killer who probably wouldn’t give Leslie Mann’s fragile wife the time of day and definitely wouldn’t associate with Kate Upton’s buxom, bubbly teenager. [The fact that this movie reduces each of them to a “type” like corporate killer or neurotic shrieking wife or bimbo is equally insulting.] The end of the movie suggests that the only reason these fake-friendships are continuing is because the women are dating each other’s brothers or fathers. Once again, prioritizing men over anything else, and reducing men to retrograde types too: the sleazy father Diaz somehow adores even though he’s just like the guy she hates, the sweet and blandly supportive brother, etc.

In fact, Mann’s wife-on-the-verge of a meltdown only pushes a friendship with Diaz because she admits (while crying) that she doesn’t have any other friends who are not her husband’s friends. It’s really more pitiful than sister-inspiring…And that gets to a larger issue with the movie: It’s refusal to deal with very sad and serious issues in a mature or deeper-than-surface-level way.

Instead of an honest scene between Mann and her longtime husband about cheating, she avoids the issue altogether for the rest of the movie and cries a lot, gets drunk a lot, befriends his mistresses, plays elaborate pranks on him, etc. When it finally comes time to confront the husband (who’s never more than a hazy pencil-sketch of a character who disappears for curiously long stretches of the movie, he’s more of a plot device than anything) it’s in a climactic scene so surreal it’s cartoonish. You can almost feel the writers saying “Is it enough that he’s being humiliated and losing everything? No, no it’s not, so why don’t we injure him several times on top of that.” You nearly feel bad for Nicolas Coster-Waldeau for being forced to act out every implausible humiliation they can think up (how would a person so forcefully walk into a glass wall twice ?) while screeching “my money, my money!” over and over.

What I Would Have Done Differently: Imagine there was a movie where the same woman was with three different men at the same time, and then imagine the rest of the movie was these three guys scheming up revenge on her. Does that sound like a good idea for a knee-slapper comedy? Wouldn’t it seem sad and petty and altogether unrealistic? I think that movie would more likely involve the men competing over the woman (like Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It) and definitely wouldn’t have such a cartoonish portrayal of everyone involved.